Lymfasta

Lymfasta is a fictional open-access dataset designed for teaching and benchmarking in bioinformatics. The name combines lymphatic biology with the FASTA sequence format, reflecting its focus on sequences associated with the lymphatic system. The collection includes nucleotide and amino acid sequences drawn from vertebrate markers and genes relevant to lymphatic tissues such as lymph nodes, spleen, and thymus. Each entry carries metadata fields for accession, species, tissue, gene symbol, and functional annotation, and sequences are provided in FASTA format as well as machine-readable JSON or CSV files.

Lymfasta is used to illustrate common data-handling tasks, including sequence alignment, motif discovery, primer design, and database indexing. It is intentionally curated to avoid sensitive information and patient data, making it suitable for classroom and benchmarking environments. The dataset is hosted in a public repository with versioning and a permissive license to encourage reproducibility.

The project originated in 2010 as a teaching resource and is maintained by a community of curators who issue periodic updates and errata. While useful for method development, Lymfasta is not a substitute for real experimental data and does not aim to reflect population diversity or disease states. See also: FASTA format, lymphatic system, bioinformatics datasets, sequence alignment.